


tl;dr: i love you

by the_cloud_whisperer



Series: Zukaang Hospital AU [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medical, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Edgeplay, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Hiccups, Intercrural Sex, It's a lot less kinky than the tags would suggest, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Not Suitable/Safe For Work, Pathologist!Aang, Porn with Feelings, Prostate Massage, Prostate Milking, Safe Sane and Consensual, Surgeon!Zuko, Zukaang Week 2020, and write something unabashedly sexy?, but indulge me because how often do i get to break out the smut-writing chops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:35:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25535944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_cloud_whisperer/pseuds/the_cloud_whisperer
Summary: Zukaang Week 2020, Day 5 NSFW: Bind"If I could just have control over one, single, trivial aspect of my life, for once… but I don’t."Zuko closes his eyes and leans his head on the back of the couch. The clink of ceramic echoes on the glass coffee table as Aang sets his mug down and shifts beside him, the sound reassuring and comfortable, and he thinks nothing of it until…"Control me, then."His eyes fly open as he registers Aang kneeling on the floor by his feet."What??"
Relationships: Aang/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Zukaang Hospital AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1850308
Comments: 12
Kudos: 197
Collections: Zukaang Week 2020





	tl;dr: i love you

**Author's Note:**

> Digital rectal massage as a cure for intractable hiccups: [Journal of Internal Medicine](https://broomedocs.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/odeh1990.pdf). First described in 1988 by Francis Fesmire in _Annals of Emergency Medicine_ , but I can't find a free online full text. 
> 
> References my initial [Zukaang hospital AU post](https://the-cloud-whisperer.tumblr.com/post/187515459637/another-zukaang-au), which details how Zuko and Aang first met over a cadaver.

Ever since Aang drove Zuko home that night, the darkness masking their deepening intimacy, things have changed between them. The difference is difficult to qualify but incontrovertibly present. Before that, they'd known each other for upwards of a year, and as the youngest attending physicians in their respective departments, they'd developed a chummy relationship that evolved with Aang's nurturing personality and Zuko's need to confide in someone who wouldn't judge. They were more than colleagues, and now they're… more than friends?

Zuko's honestly not sure. People have never been his strong suit. All he knows is that one thing led to another. One Saturday afternoon, he called Aang in a panic because a case was running well into the evening and he'd forgotten to leave food out for his cat. Cue Aang driving over to his townhouse and letting himself in with the spare key, which led to Zuko driving home at midnight and finding him sprawled on the floor playing with Teapot ("she looked so lonely when I tried to leave!"), which led to Aang sleeping on his couch, which led to him keeping the spare key to regularly feed Teapot on the weekends, and some weekday evenings as well.

It's one of these Saturday evenings when Zuko returns, footsteps heavy and back impossibly achy, after a disastrous surgery.

"None of it was anyone's fault," he recounts as he pets Teapot's sable fur mindlessly, the cat purring without regard for her human's distress. "She had a tumor as big as a basketball in her colon—she can't possibly have passed a normal bowel movement in years, judging by the size of it. There were mets everywhere on PET-CT, including to the brain. Even if we'd successfully resected it, it would be palliative care and three months to live, on the outside. But we still did thirty minutes of CPR because she'd hemmed and hawed about signing a DNR form for weeks, and her husband finally convinced her against it."

Aang's curled up on the couch next to him, holding a mug of tea as he listens. "I've heard it said that modern medicine excels at prolonging life, but not at improving quality of life," he says thoughtfully. "I can't imagine how defeating it must be to know that even if you save someone's life on the operating table, you may not be doing them a favor."

"You're right. It would be bearable, you know, if I could make, hell, _one_ decision for myself every day. I don’t control how many hours I work, how many operations I do, how many patients I see in one clinic session. The hospital decides all that. For fuck's sake, sometimes I have three patients booked for the same half-hour slot because the billing department's counting on two of them to no-show. And of course then all three of them show up."

Aang has no rejoinder to that, but what can anyone say in response to an embittered surgeon's constant uphill struggle? Zuko thinks crossly.

Teapot stretches luxuriously and clambers across his and Aang's laps to leap to the floor and out of sight. He watches her go with resignation. _There's a reason I'm in my mid-thirties and have a cat instead of any dating life worth discussing—can't compartmentalize work and personal life, can't shut up about job stress halfway through dinner_.

"If I could just have control over one, single, trivial aspect of my life, for once… but I don’t."

Zuko closes his eyes and leans his head on the back of the couch. The clink of ceramic echoes on the glass coffee table as Aang sets his mug down and shifts beside him, the sound reassuring and comfortable, and he thinks nothing of it until…

"Control me, then."

His eyes fly open as he registers Aang kneeling on the floor by his feet.

"What??" He's missing a large piece of the puzzle here.

"You want to have control over one single aspect of your life. You can't control anything at work, but you have an outlet in your personal life. I'm saying, if it helps you relieve some stress, you can control me."

 _That… clarifies nothing._ "Control you _in what sense?"_ Zuko demands as the conversation drifts, amoeba-like, far outside his realm of comprehension.

Aang lowers his gaze pointedly, raising an eyebrow in the universal signal for "you know what I'm talking about, but you don’t want to admit it." Zuko hurriedly glances down to make sure: there's no telltale tenting over his crotch to call him out. There is nothing arousing about this situation, he tells himself firmly.

That would be more convincing if he could get himself to stop staring at those lovely, full lips, pursed right at the level of Zuko's thighs. Fuck.

"Aang…" He pauses, wondering how to articulate any of this. "What… the fuck. Why…? I mean, we're colleagues, and friends, and…" And that is straying dangerously close to the thought of _more than friends,_ which is a topic off-limits; he doesn’t even dare to think of it.

"Yes, we are friends," Aang says, still gazing earnestly up at him. "And this doesn’t have to change any of that. Friends care for each other, yeah? We provide for each other's needs. You have a need that's going unfulfilled. I might be able to satisfy that need. Ergo—"

"Oh, my god." The _ergo_ does it for Zuko; this conversation has officially transcended the boundaries of earthly understanding. Trust Aang to blithely rationalize his way into having sex with Zuko. Not just that, but to further have… some sort of built-in power imbalance in their sexual relations? _Out of my depth here, wayyyy outside my area of expertise, if this were a patient encounter, I'd be referring out for sure._

"Zuko…"

The crisis spinning behind his eyes must be showing in his prolonged silence, and Aang worries that he might have gone too far. "Look, I'm sorry I mentioned this. I know it's too much to take in."

_No kidding—friends with dubious benefits is quite a step above buying each other dinner, or feeding my cat, or sleeping on my couch. Perspective, is what it's called._

But somehow… he doesn’t want to refuse.

"I just hate to see you so frustrated and unhappy, and it's not like I wouldn’t be getting anything out of it." Aang lays his head down on his folded forearms, resting amiably on the couch, but there's a stillness in his shoulders and a slight bunched-up wrinkle of his brow that belies his fear of rejection.

"Sorry," he repeats. "I won't bring it up again."

"No."

Questioning eyes flicker back towards his.

"I mean… I'm not saying no," Zuko clarifies. "I just don’t know how to say yes at this exact moment."

 _Great explanation, Zuko, that makes so much sense._ But Aang nods sagely, ever understanding.

"It's a difficult question to answer: 'Do you want me carnally but only as good friends?'" he says with all the wisdom of a widely read guru (who may have gotten into some, ahem, _heretical_ texts). "You don’t have to decide now. It wasn't fair of me to spring it on you, but that's just one thing I'd be willing to do if it would make you feel better."

* * *

"Do I want to know the rest?" Zuko asks warily.

 _If hearing the term "friends-with-benefits" sends you into an apoplectic fit, then no, probably not,_ Aang thinks with a touch of fond resignation. _What else would I be willing to do? Nothing short of love you to the ends of the earth and beyond._

* * *

Zuko returns home around six P.M. the Saturday after that, not too bad for weekend call. Today's surgeries went surprisingly smoothly. As he drops his keys on the mail table, he hears an odd gulping noise from the kitchen, followed by the sound of gargling. _That's weird._

Teapot is nowhere to be seen; probably napping in her cat tree, not making weird gulping sounds. Her food bowl is flecked with spots of tuna from dinner, so her sitter is here, which begs the question: what is going on?

"Aang?" He ventures into the kitchen to find his favorite pathologist bent over the sink, resting his elbows on the white tile, forehead pressed to the palms of his hands in a picture of despondence. "What's wrong?"

"Zuk—hic!"

Uh.

"Hic!" Aang hiccups, clutching at the back of his head in despair. "Fuck, Zuko, I can't stop—hic! —hiccupping! I've been—hic! — hiccupping for three hours straight!"

Zuko, struck dumb by the bizarreness of the situation, can only hazard a measly, "Are you sure?"

"What do you mean, _am I sure?"_ Aang gesticulates, the force of his emotion temporarily distracting him from hiccupping. "Hic! It started before I got here at three thirty! Hic! It got so bad that Teapot—hic! — wouldn’t even stay in the same—hic! —room as me, she thinks I'm possessed or something! Hic! I had to hide in the bathroom while she—hic! —ate dinner, it's that bad."

"Okay…" Gods, this is the one condition they'd never been taught to treat in medical school because they're supposed to go away on their own. Hiccups aren't a medical emergency, but Aang makes them look like one.

"I've hiccupped so much that—hic! —my abs hurt," he moans, clutching his belly as Zuko leads him towards the sitting room, settling him down on the couch, quite at a loss as to what else to do. "I tried everything—holding my breath, drinking water—hic! —ice cubes, drinking from a cup upside down, eating sugar—hic! — lying on my stomach, Valsalva maneuver, carotid massage, but nothing works."

Dimly, in the annals of Zuko's early days of residency, memories of reading a very strange case report resurface. A cure for intractable hiccups, serendipitously discovered in the 80s and since then, corroborated by multiple investigators around the world.

Digital rectal massage.

"Aang…" he says carefully. "I might have a solution for you."

* * *

"You wanted me to control you," Zuko reiterates once they're situated on his bed. He's sitting upright on the edge, fully clothed, torso twisted haphazardly to face Aang, who has poured himself over the sheets in hiccupping abandon, unabashedly naked and eager to pursue a solution.

"Yes, I haven't forgotten—hic! And that includes controlling these accursed hiccups, so—hic! Please! Control away!"

Zuko offers up mental sacrifices to the gods of patience as he navigates this conundrum. "Okay, but before that: can I trust you to tell me if you want to stop?"

Something in his voice must alert Aang to how deadly serious he is about this, and he pauses amid his hiccup-laden throes to meet Zuko's gaze without levity. "Yes," he says simply. "I'll tell you to stop if I want to stop."

 _I can work with that._ Slowly, the form of their encounter begins to take shape. In his mind, it's like planning the course of a procedure. The anatomy—well, that's obvious. The method of incision, what type of blade, the placement of each instrument, the slow advancement through skin and tissue and viscera to carefully liberate a discrete mass; handing off the tumor specimen is a relieving climax in itself, the trophy of a successful operation. The aftermath, sewing flesh and bone back together, restoring everything to neat order and serene rightness. Everything has to be perfect.

"Then I bind you to your word," Zuko pronounces, wincing at how anachronistically liturgical he sounds. "From now until we leave this bed: everything I say, you do."

Gloves, lube, and he rolls Aang onto his side, legs folded miserably to his chest as more hiccups wrack his body. One finger traces the rim of his entrance, and Aang shivers at this small intrusion. Somehow, he feels the question in Zuko's touch, and his quaking entreaty, " _Please,_ Zuko," undoes all hesitation.

He pushes smoothly inside, feeling the muscular walls tighten around his finger. He keeps a rigid eye on Aang's profile, listening for any stutter in his shallow breathing. He can't help feeling that he is cataclysmically breaching not only Aang's lower GI tract, but also every unspoken contract that exists between friends. Some words are not made to be said; some feelings do not exist to be acted upon. Yet here they are.

"Oh…"

The softest sigh, an angelic murmur, and Zuko hates how his cock is beginning to feel the strain at that innocent utterance. Another hiccup conveniently kills that mood, and he slides the pad of his finger back and forth across the anterior wall of the rectal passage, just as he would do for a routine prostate exam. It's not always easy to find on an initial sweep, but there's a small bulge under his finger that seems promising, and he lightly depresses it, watching for a reaction.

His—friend? Friend with benefits? Lover? Inexplicably-quasi-boyfriend, at this point? — does not disappoint, clutching at the pillows and rearing his head back from the sudden pleasure. He's still hiccupping, the random jolts of his exhausted diaphragm rocking his whole body, including Zuko's finger, still pressed against his prostate. They run a few more cycles of this sequence—prostate massage, pleasured writhing, hiccup, further prostate massage, repeat.

Everything about him is so fundamentally expressive, from the sculpted dimple of his lips to his long neck, tendons taut and distinct, to the fine sheen of sweat drenching his back. He traces a finger down midline, stopping at the rise of his buttocks where his other hand is occupied, and _oh,_ the heavens wept. Perfection is in the firm swell of muscle tempered by soft tissue that yields to the press of his fingers. A sordid sigh, punctuated by several more hiccups, as he indulges his urge to grab and squeeze, to _own._

Two fingers, Zuko decides, that should be enough to properly sound out the prostate without stretching him to uncomfortable limits. It's crazy to hope that this will work, but he can't back out now, knuckle-deep up Aang's ass. He withdraws slightly, bringing his second finger up to the anal verge. "Deep breath in, and then out.”

Two fingers slide deep inside, and there's no mistaking the way he recoils at the invasion, just on the wrong side of too tense and rigid. That won't help matters.

"Relax." He runs his other hand down his side, ghosting over his flank and resting firmly on his thigh, trying to impart ease and soothing to the quivering body under his hands. "Tell me how you're feeling."

"Mm, Zuko…" he sighs, eyes closed, head so tilted on its axis as to represent anatomical improbability. For long moments, he remains speechless, overcome by pleasure and stimulation and the general muchness of it all—too much? Zuko worries.

" _Aang."_

He blinks his eyes open. "It stopped."

Zuko frowns, glancing down at the continued input of two digits inside Aang. "I didn’t stop."

"No, my hiccups stopped!" he clarifies, reminding Zuko of why they'd even embarked on this mad endeavor in the first place.

He stares. Aang stares. Not a single hiccup dares to interrupt their staring contest. They really have stopped.

"Oh, thank God!" Aang flops over onto his back, fingers still lodged up his rear. "Thank _you,"_ he corrects himself. "You never appreciate what you have until you lose it: a hiccup-free life. We take it all for granted."

The inkling of a devious thought presents itself. Zuko presses down on the smooth, walnut-sized gland that's becoming so familiar, and grey eyes widen, not expecting this.

"We do take it for granted," he says slowly, deliberately. "So I think I'd better keep going, just to make sure they don’t come back. There's no suggested duration of treatment that's been validated by clinical trials, after all. I need to do my due duty for your health and prevent any further episodes of hiccups, you understand."

 _Control me,_ Aang had said, and fuck, if he doesn’t look like the most unspeakably beautiful thing Zuko's ever had dominion over. Gazing up at him with shocked, feverish eyes, a light flush rising to his cheeks and chest, and it doesn’t escape notice that his cock is hard and leaking a faint stream of fluid, his arousal deliriously enchanting.

"Do you want to stop?" Zuko asks, slipping out of the persona for a moment, a little concerned that he's stepping too far.

"No," Aang whispers hoarsely. "Keep… keep going."

It's like watching a summer storm pour its bounty out on the parched earth, the heavens transfixed by miles of grey clouds. A heaviness in the air, a charged humidity, Aang's shuddering breaths, and Zuko wonders if he is allowed to kiss them out of his lungs, swallow those hot and impassioned moans like the rain that replenishes the drought-ridden land.

Best not to test their boundaries, though. _Control me,_ Aang had said, not _make love to me._ That's… not on the table.

The first raindrops, timid and tiny, as the body before him responds to the ever-cresting pleasure wrought by his skilled hands. He rests his free hand on the inside of Aang's knee, keeping him spread open. "Tell me again. How are you feeling?"

"Nggghh…" He’s barely coherent. "So, so good… you do this to all your patients, then?"

"Just the ones who ask nicely." There is only one. He watches the growing pool of pre-come gathering on Aang's belly, glistening and so enticing. "Your prostate feels normal, by the way. Perfectly smooth with no nodules, no enlargement, no bogginess or tenderness when I press down like this."

"Fuck!" Aang's cock twitches at the increased stimulus, more pre-come oozing out, and the resultant pleasured groan goes straight to Zuko's own cock, still trapped in its clothed bounds. "You're fucking amazing at dirty talk; how could you possibly know that routine medical checkups get me so hot and bothered?"

The storm builds in his wanton sprawl across the bed, neck and back arched as if spineless and controlled by puppet strings from above instead of probing fingers from below. He reaches for his aching cock, and though Zuko feels a throb of sympathy, he wants Aang to wait, to resist.

"Do I need to bind your hands?" He catches Aang's wrist before he can touch himself and chase his brilliant climax. "The study didn’t say anything about reaching orgasm, just prostate massage. By that logic, I should keep this up all night without letting you come."

How long can they sustain the high tide of the storm like this? How long can they bear to be battered by fat droplets of desire, unacknowledged, unsatisfied? It's twenty minutes past seven, so Zuko sets his goal.

"Twenty more minutes," he decides. "If you can resist coming for twenty more minutes, you'll have the best orgasm of your life at the end."

* * *

_Fucking hell, Zuko, you demon_. _Four years of med school, four years of residency, two years of fellowship, you think delayed gratification is a foreign concept to me?_

And yet twenty minutes is an eternity when you're hard as a rock and not able to do anything about it. It's so much to do, he realizes now, ceding control completely to another person. But he trusts Zuko to hold onto his pleasure for him and see him safely through this blistering episode of denial, even though he really, REALLY fucking wants to come.

He props himself up on his elbows with much effort, the better to see Zuko as he works down below, the slow, measured glide of his fingers almost hypnotic. It would be easy to assume that he does this all the time, that he's superbly unaffected by the routine motions he's going through, but Aang suspects that's not quite the case.

"There's something I never told you, Zuko," he rasps. _Fuck, I can't last at this rate… but if I can't, then neither will he._

"Remember when we first met in the radiology suite? You were reading a CT scan with Mai, and I came down with a troupe of kids to put a cadaver through the scanner. And I never told you, but after I left, I was so befuddled with your gorgeousness that I nearly got us lost in the tunnels under the hospital complex. I swore the students to secrecy, but now you know."

"You…" Zuko tries again, swallowing through a dry throat. "You thought I was attractive?"

"Not just attractive, but elegant, poised, mysterious, and quite frankly, hot as hell." He grins, satisfied with his plan, and notes how Zuko shifts awkwardly over Aang's lower body, his pants getting uncomfortably tight. "I was _smitten."_

"Yeah, I'll smite you now, just to show you _smitten."_

 _Fuck._ "Ah—!" Aang gasps out—well, that backfired spectacularly, he reflects as Zuko renews his efforts. The intermittent trickle from Aang's cock is now a constant gentle stream, and gods, he doesn’t think he's ever felt this aroused in his life. 

"Getting to know you personally didn’t change my opinion. You're—gahh, Zuko—amazing, you know that? You have this strong, solid reassurance that makes people sit up and take note, even if you don’t feel it. Every time you'd present a complicated case at tumor board in such a straightforward talk, I'd think, there's no way you're fresh out of fellowship like me. Every time I watched you in the OR wrangling testy nurses and residents without breaking a sweat— _ohhhh…"_

Cut off again by more insistent pressure on his prostate, Zuko resisting his rebellion. Two can play at this game, he thinks through the wild currents of overstimulation assaulting his brain. It's almost too much, and he laughs aloud as he reflects on their differing versions of dirty talk.

"Listen, I must have a competency kink or something, because you get me— _nnghh, fuck_ —so amped, and I want to do the same for you."

 _"Aang."_ He says it sternly, in warning, and Aang wonders, as he writhes in helpless thrall against those manipulative fingers, how Zuko can find so many different ways to say his name. With such minute inflections to change the tone of his expression: worry, command, query, hesitation, desire…

_My name in your mouth: it's music to my ears. The only thing more beautiful would be your name on my lips._

"Zuko, _Zuko,"_ he moans as he strays ever closer to climax. " _Please,_ Zuko." He's lost track of how many times he's dangled over the edge, longing to fall, only to be pulled back by the ruthless easing of talented fingers exercising seamless control over his body.

"Not yet," Zuko murmurs. "Not yet. Keep resisting, just for a while now…"

The onslaught of sensation is overpowering him. "Zuko, I _can't—"_

"Do you want to stop?"

How can he stop now, when pleasures untold lie just beyond reach? "No," he chokes out. "No, keep going… keep—keep going…"

"I was the same, actually." Zuko's voice is low and dampened with barely contained desire, and it’s thrilling to know that he hasn’t escaped unscathed. "When I first saw you, you with your dizzying cheer and your glowing passion for teaching and your angel's voice… I couldn’t help but want you. You and your love for life, and I wanted to make you mine."

 _I want that too._ Tears spring to Aang’s eyes, the intensity of their coupling increasing exponentially with these declarations.

"And somehow, you seemed to want it too." Zuko reads his mind, and this must be it, it has to be, they can't keep this up forever. He wriggles more emphatically on Zuko's fingers, fucking himself without a care, and this time, his dear, emotionally constipated surgeon lets him. This constant push and pull, one controlling the other and vice versa in endless tandem, has finally wafted them to their high tide.

" _Zuko—!"_

The waves break on the rocky cliffs as the storm rains down relentlessly, and he cries out that single name that grants him a lifeline amid the turmoil of his climax. His cock twitches, untouched, tirelessly pulsing out wave after wave, his battered prostate emptying itself completely. Aang thinks he might be crying from the intensity of his sustained denial and release, but he's not very sure. Earthly attachments to his post-orgasmic body are suspiciously sparse and tenuous.

 _Gods, I could just pass out now…_ Dazed, he gazes up at the ceiling, stymied when he realizes what he's staring at.

"Are those from Netter? Zuko, you are such a fucking nerd." He _is,_ though. Those are diagrams of lymph node locations throughout the body from the esteemed _Atlas of Human Anatomy;_ Aang recognizes them from medical school, and Zuko has them _pasted over his bed_.

"It's hard to distinguish what's fat and what's lymph nodes on the operating table, so you have to take a leap of faith and resect based on where you know they're supposed to be," Zuko defends himself.

Aang frowns at his tone, taut and strained. He feels light as a cloud right now, but Zuko is clearly less so. _Oh._

"Zuko, didn’t you…?" Aang's not sure what he intends as he reaches for Zuko's hips, wanting to indulge him as well. "Let's not be shy—don’t you want to…?"

He intercepts Aang clumsily, instead stuffing a box of tissues into his hand to clean himself up. "No, no," he insists. "I was going to let you get decent while I go to the bathroom and… deal with myself."

 _Excuse me??_ "Deal with yourself? You're going to go get yourself off in the bathroom when all this," he gestures expansively down the length of his sticky body, "is available to you?"

Zuko sighs, unfolding his legs and rising to stand. He leans over Aang at the edge of the bed and almost reluctantly cradles his cheek in one hand. Aang nuzzles into the palm of his hand like a clingy cat (Teapot is probably outside the bedroom door at this moment wondering what her humans are up to).

"Well, I don’t want to impose on you," Zuko says uncomfortably, trying to subtly adjust himself in his pants with his other hand. "So I was planning on a cold shower, that's all." He turns toward the bathroom.

 _Oh, for fuck's sake._ Before he can take another step, Aang yanks him back towards the bed, hard enough that Zuko tumbles down on top of him, chest to chest, the rasp of the fabric of his clothes delightfully overstimulating on sensitized skin.

"Aang," he says sharply. "What now?"

"'From now until we leave this bed: everything I say, you do,'" Aang drolly quotes Zuko's terms. "Well, you broke the terms when you left me here and got out of bed. The contract is no longer binding. I can do as I please, and what would please me is if you would fuck me into next week, right now."

"Trust me, I'm pretty sure your prostate is too sensitive for any more stimulation. You're not going to want that."

But Zuko wants it, judging by his heavy breaths and wide pupils, close enough for Aang to lose himself in, and he lets himself go, surging up into a deep kiss. Zuko freezes for a moment only, then sinks into the kiss with a monumental sigh, tilting his head and lapping softly at Aang's lips like he's starving for a taste of the windfall.

_Yes…_

They part briefly, and Aang takes advantage of Zuko's stunned pause to flip back onto his side, rear end still liberally lubricated. He's really going to need a shower after this, but preferably not alone.

"Like this." He presents his thighs, pressed tightly together, and turns his head to witness Zuko's reaction. "You've heard of intercrural, yes?"

It finally clicks. Zuko swallows thickly, still hesitant. "In theory, yes."

"Well, it's time to practice."

* * *

He realizes now, as he fucks Aang's tensed thighs, that he should have known all along. Aang knew what he needed: to have a special someone all to his own, just as Zuko himself has to give of himself every day at the beck and call of his profession. It's different from the way that other surgeons vent their anger and frustration on hapless medical students. This is Aang saying: _I trust you not to hurt me even if you don’t trust yourself, even if you yourself are hurting from the world's innumerable injustices. I believe in you, even if no one else does._

_Tl;dr: I love you._

Searing kisses at Aang's nape, the curve of his head and the delicate flower of his ears. Their arms entwine, his around Aang's chest, Aang's around the back of his neck as he imparts more force to his impassioned thrusts. He can feel his love shaking as he struggles to keep up the tension in his legs, his whole body held on edge for far too long. He deserves a long and pampering bath after this; neither of them expected their relations to bloom so vigorously today.

 _Fuck, Aang._ Each thrust grazes the bottom of his sac, the wrinkled skin adding friction to his growing arousal, egging him on towards the end. Mild regret for not having enjoyed this body in its completeness is subsumed by the thought that Aang will stay the night, and they will have the morning for further explorations.

They will have even more time after that: months, years—who knows where their love will take them? They have only a promise sealed with interlocked hands in the dark, consummated in his release, renewed as they lay their lips flush to each other, so hot and seeking.

_I love you too._

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on other social media via [my Tumblr](http://the-cloud-whisperer.tumblr.com)!


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